While I was on a recent radio show, a student called in from a
campus "Rally Against 1070," that challenged Arizona's draconian
immigration law. The rally was a great idea, part of the public outcry
that's needed. But I wish they'd called it something like "Rally
Against the Show Us Your Papers Law." Headlining it with a bill number
gave people nothing to respond to emotionally.

Over nearly 40 years that I've spoken out on various causes and
written about citizen movements, I've come to believe that people work
for justice when their hearts are stirred by specific lives and
situations that develop our capacity to feel empathy, to imagine
ourselves as someone else. New information—the percentage of people out
of work or children in poverty, the numbers behind America's record
health care costs, the annual planetary increases in greenhouse
gases—can help us comprehend the magnitude of our shared problems and
develop appropriate responses. But information alone can't provide the
organic connection that binds one person to another, or that stirs our
hearts to act.

The most successful activists know the power of stories to
move people's hearts, so weave the richness of personal example into
their arguments.

Powerful stories can break us beyond our isolated worlds. "They link
teller to listeners," writes Scott Russell Sanders, "and listeners to
one another." They let us glimpse the lives of those older or younger,
richer or poorer, of different races, from places we'll never even see.
Showing us the links between choices and consequences, they train our
sight, "give us images for what is truly worth seeking, worth having,
worth doing." Stories also teach us, Sanders suggests, how "every
gesture, every act, every choice we make sends ripples of influence
into the future."

This means that we are more likely to challenge homelessness if we
hear the testimonies of individual people living on the street. We will
work to overcome illiteracy after gaining a sense of what it's like to
be unable to read. We need to know how many thousands of gallons are
leaking out each day from the Louisiana oil spill—that gives clues to
the magnitude of the disaster. But we're more likely to act on it if we
can envision what actually happens as the oil begins to poison the
shrimp, oysters, crawfish, and pristine beaches we've long taken for
granted. Psychological studies of those who rescued Jews during the
Holocaust found they differed from their peers in their ability to be
moved by pain, sadness, and helplessness.

Soul of a CitizenBecome a Dedicated Friend of YES! Magazine and get the book for free.

Concrete stories can help us engage the world's troubles without
becoming so overwhelmed that we despair of ever being able to change
things. As psychologist Joanna Macy reminds us, "information by itself
can increase resistance [to engagement], deepening the sense of apathy
and powerlessness." Stories about particular individuals and specific
situations usually have the opposite effect. By giving seemingly
overwhelming problems a human face, they allow us to act from a sense
of loyalty to specific people, communities, or places. Responsibility
in this view becomes not an abstract principle but a way of being and
connecting.

Of course our culture has plenty of false stories. So we need to ask
whether the examples that stir our hearts—or those of our political
opponents—are accurate or whether they're manipulated inventions, like
the talk of government "death panels" or Obama as Manchurian Kenyan. A
recent Harris poll found that 45 percent of Republicans believed Obama
was not born in this country so had no right to be president, and 57
percent believed he was a Muslim. That's a stunning indictment of
Republican elected officials who know that those beliefs are absolute
nonsense, but (with a few exceptions like Lindsay Graham) have been
conveniently silent on them, perhaps because they like stirring up the
Tea Party base.

But that doesn't negate the need to get beyond arcane policy
prescriptions to tell the examples at the core of the issues we care
about. It just means we need to ensure our stories are accurate. We
could even say that whichever side gets their stories out to frame
public discourse will likely win any given political battle.

Stories Help Us Connect

Stories motivate through a sense of connection, whether we encounter
them first hand or retold by others. A Long Island teacher named Carol
McNulty felt inspired to take a stand after watching a video of a
brown-eyed girl, in a documentary called Zoned for Slavery.
Though only fifteen, the girl had worked for two years making 56 cents
an hour sewing clothes for the Gap and Eddie Bauer in a maquiladora,
a factory inside a free-trade zone in El Salvador. Her 18-hour days
left little time for eating, sleeping, or even going to the bathroom.
She had to buy her food from the company store. Attending high school
was out of the question, though she said shyly that she'd like to
someday. The factory bosses prohibited workers from talking with each
other, and when some of the bolder ones tried to organize, they were
fired.

"I saw such a look of helplessness," Carol explained. "My own
children's eyes are so bright and cheerful. Hers were equally
beautiful, but so beaten down and clouded by despair. It's wrong for
children to live like that—undernourished, without hope, literally
chained to machines. She was just one young woman whose life was so
blocked. If you multiply that by all the others, it's horrendous." It
angered Carol that a child could be this abused for greed.

So every Saturday for two months Carol and her husband stood in
front of a nearby Gap store, braving biting winter rain and freezing
snow, and joined by a dozen others. Like citizens picketing the chain's
stores throughout the country, they handed out literature and talked
with customers. They helped promote a Long Island visit by a group of
young women who worked in the factory and were touring the U.S. to tell
their story. In the face of a growing public outcry, the Gap
capitulated, pledging to ensure that contractors allow independent
monitoring by churches and human rights groups and free access by
unions. The campaign had won at least a beginning step.

Like the organizers who worked to tell the stories of the maquiladora
workers, the most successful activists know the power of stories to
move people's hearts, so weave the richness of personal example into
their arguments. If particular institutions are exploitative,
ecologically destructive, or otherwise oppressive, effective activists
don't rely on mind-numbing rhetorical labels to arouse concern.
Instead, they describe precisely how the institutions damage people's
lives or degrade the environment. They frame policy proposals not in
terms of arcane acronyms, bill numbers, or implementation details, but
particular consequences. They continually link their arguments and
visions to narratives that can touch people's hearts.

I saw this when Oregon state employees, who were predominantly
female and universally underpaid, began fighting for a living wage.
Their unions started the campaign by hiring experts to draw up more
equitable pay schedules. The resulting task force surveyed every
category of job, then presented an elaborate report in the most neutral
technical terms. At the request of top-level managers, they added more
data. Eventually the study became so unwieldy and abstract that
ordinary workers felt it had nothing to do with their lives, or their
gut sense that their labor was undervalued. "Most of those affected
couldn't even talk about the proposals," recalled the economist who
chaired the task force, "because they didn't know the language, all the
personnel-oriented, management-oriented terms. It left them completely
out of the discussion." Lacking popular understanding or support, the
effort collapsed of its own weight, dead on arrival at the legislature.

Then the unions shifted strategy, arranging for public-sector
employees to speak for themselves to the media, community groups, and
their elected officials. They posed simple but very telling questions:
Why did women who took care of children at university daycare centers
earn less than workers monitoring animals at local private research
labs? Why did public sector secretaries earn less than mail carriers?
Why did nursing home aides earn less than entry level workers at
insurance companies and banks? Testifying before the state legislature,
they explained that their jobs mattered greatly to them, as well as to
the community. Then they asked the senators how much they thought they
earned. Holding up pay stubs as proof, they shamed the legislators with
the reality of their economic plight: Some made so little for full-time
work, they needed food stamps to get by. The union won pay raises and
other concessions that made working conditions more equitable. It
triumphed by letting their members tell their own stories, in their own
words, and by so doing going to the heart of their cause.